Inferiority of femal athletes: myth or reality.

Abstract

motor ability. For all activities, with the exception of the softball throw, the boys’ and girls’ scores were essentially identical from 5 through 11-13 years of age. Beyond the age of 11-13 years, the girls’ performance leveled off while the boys’ performance continued to improve, thus creating an ever increasing gap with increasing age. A recent unpublished study completed in our laboratory illustrated a unique phenomenon for the softball throw, when thrown with the nondominant arm, for boys and girls aged 3-22 years. Results for the dominant arm agreed with those presented by Espenschade,2 i.e., the boys throwing the ball approximately twice the distance as thrown by the girls at each age. When the factors of practice and experience were removed by using the nondominant arm, the results were identical for the two sexes up to the age of 10-12 years. Are social and cultural restrictions confounding these male-female comparisons ? Recently, much attention has been given to the intriguing problem of whether true biological performance differences exist between the sexes. This paper will attempt to briefly review the recent work originating from our laboratory. Most of this research